Tuesday, March 31, 2015

One of my machines is mostly a spare, loaded with disks. I just run stable Debian on it, and it never fails. When I last rejuvenated it, I just wanted 4 cpu's and an integrated graphics, since I wasn't playing with it. So I got the recommended simple board with an AMD apu processor. This has all the graphics in it, and the board allows the outputs. I had a very old monitor, and just used VEGA, and it worked.

Now we had a monitor shuffle, where the kids get the new ones, and I get the last one in line. This had a DVI input, and so I wanted to use it on this machine. Didn't work. Drove me nuts since I also had a bad dvi cable, and another flaky monitor to compare with. Took me forever to find the good cable, and a good monitor, to prove that the board was not putting out on dvi. Blah.

Compile the radeon as a module, since I couldn't get the hard-kernel method to work. That happens lots of times. All working now. The fun of Linux.

On another note, I had a lot of old computers to get rid of, and I wanted to clean the hard drives. On the old-old machines I took a hammer to the disk, and threw out in the garbage-garbage. Now we have electronic recycling and I want to put these out. I assume they something useful with them. I found that my Tails Linux live usb worked great. I just ran 'shred' on the main disk. Supposed to be garbage man proof!

Thursday, March 26, 2015

We, who love old clocks, have waited for this moment. Who can remember to wind at the exact same time every day? Even if you do, the time varies wildly with the weather. The mechanisms are beautiful and I started my path to engineering fixing these things when I was a kid.

That's why you carefully preserve the mechanism for your grandkids to put it back if they want. They'll soon take it out again. The new quartz guts have a perfect tone, choice of chimes, volume control and night silence. All the things you wanted when you first brought one of these things home.

In Canada, choose Craftime Clockery for your quartz mechanism. All you really have to choose is the shaft length. For example, this clock was 3/4 inch, and another one was 1/4 inch. I chose the speaker version, instead of actual striking chimes. The sound is beautiful. And you can rely on the time! And free hands.

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

As we recall in our continuing saga, Texas allows saltwater injection, and has never had earthquakes with this. But, greed being what it is, the injectors are tempted by the Fruits of Satan, which in this case means gas-frack waste. They mix it in and are shocked, shocked to get earthquakes. Then it takes forever for them to secretly own up, and you get a big mess, like up in Dallas.

I'm calling this one to be the next Irving, but the odds are low. We need a few more earthquakes to be sure.

Update: Nothing more, just like OK. Oh well, all these latest micro-hypotheses are going into the can. :(

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

I'm fairly convinced that as a major event starts to homogenize a large fault area, it slides to a critical displacement. This activates earthquakes all over the zone. However, the storm earthquakes may actually be activated by the stress relief of the pre-slide. The large regional stress relief, however, of the major event somehow shuts everything down for a while. It's sort of a complex anti-process that I can't figure out.

Anyway, tomorrow or the next day we'll have a doozy of an earthquake, and everything will go quiet. I don't have hard physics on this, but it has been the general pattern. I still give it 50/50 that it could break out of this pattern and do something else. Oh well.....

Update: nothing big to wake up to. The storm continues.

Update2: I've decided this is the old concept of dilation, which was really big 30 years ago. Basically, the rupture plane must yield slowly and homogenize to a uniform small critical displacement. Then it is ready for a super-rupture. It is the same with landslides. With a rough and strong surface, there must be an expansion of the fault surface, which allows in more water. This can generate electrical signals and tremor, which makes the animals go crazy, or all these storm earthquakes. Then pow!

Update3: Dilation was an MIT concept before that whole area died, and the smart people went to Stanford.

Update4: Wed. has proven to be generally quiet without a large earthquake. The pattern is breaking, and if there isn't a large earthquake tomorrow, it is six feet under.

Monday, March 23, 2015

In Canada we know what a 2-4 is. It's a case of beer to watch the hockey game! Good times.

Not so good down there.

These 4's aren't even a penultimate quenching event, they are part of the chatter. At some point we can have a runaway reaction, but this probably isn't it.

A chatter that includes 4's means that something bigger is coming. I sure wish they would have sprung for some accelerometers. Those puny seismometers are just going to bounce out of their cases.

Anyway these events seem to be deep, so nobody should be worried.

Update: both events are oblique-normal (tension), so not much of a PGV (Intensity).

Update2: Intense chatter close to 4. Wouldn't want to be around there.

Update3: Difficult to know the exact physics here. If I were a young spring chicken with a big computer, I would model it as discrete elements. Then I would figure out what is the more likely mechanism - that of a large event starting to give a difficult birth and stimulating the storm, or the inverse of the storm giving rise to a big bouncing baby...